ITC Zapf Chancery is a family of script typefaces designed by the type designer

Hermann Zapf Hermann Zapf (; 8 November 1918 – 4 June 2015) was a German type designer and calligrapher who lived in Darmstadt, Germany. He was married to the calligrapher and typeface designer Gudrun Zapf-von Hesse. Typefaces he designed include ...

and marketed by the

International Typeface Corporation The International Typeface Corporation (ITC) was a type manufacturer founded in New York in 1970 by Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin and Edward Rondthaler. The company was one of the world's first type foundries to have no history in the production of ...

. It is one of the three typefaces designed by Zapf that are shipped with computers running Apple's

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

. It is one of the core

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Do ...

fonts.

History

Zapf Chancery was announced in 1979 in six styles from light to bold, the demibold and bold styles being released without italics. It was named after the

English name English names are names used in, or originating in, England. In England as elsewhere in the English-speaking world, a complete name usually consists of a given name, commonly referred to as a first name, and a (most commonly patrilineal) family ...

for a Renaissance handwriting style later adapted as an inspiration for early printing.

Variants and similar typefaces

Like many typefaces of the period, imitations of Zapf Chancery were created for specific uses and by competing companies. URW Chancery L by URW (Unternehmensberatung Rubow Weber—from the founders' names now retitled URW++) provides a GPL-ed clone of the font. An extended version TeX Gyre Chorus is another similar typeface based on the URW Chancery L font. This typeface is released in formats compatible with

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

as well as with modern

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...

compatible systems. A popular lookalike design has been Monotype Corsiva, by Patricia Saunders at the

Monotype Corporation Monotype Imaging Holdings Inc., founded as Lanston Monotype Machine Company in 1887 in Philadelphia by Tolbert Lanston, is an American (historically Anglo-American) company that specializes in digital typesetting and typeface design for use with ...

. Monotype at the time created or licensed many lookalike typefaces for Microsoft software with identical metrics to popular fonts, including

Century Gothic A century is a period of 100 years. Centuries are numbered ordinally in English and many other languages. The word ''century'' comes from the Latin ''centum'', meaning ''one hundred''. ''Century'' is sometimes abbreviated as c. A centennial or ...

Arial Arial (also called Arial MT) is a sans-serif typeface and set of computer fonts in the neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows from Windows 3.1 on, some other Microsoft software ...

and

Book Antiqua Palatino is the name of an old-style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf, initially released in 1949 by the Stempel foundry and later by other companies, most notably the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. Named after the 16th-century Italia ...

, also a Zapf knockoff. Zapf resigned from

ATypI The ATypI () or Association Typographique Internationale (the International Typography Association) is an international non-profit organisation dedicated to typography and type design. The primary activity of the association is an annual fall con ...

(Association Typographique Internationale) over what he viewed as its hypocritical attitude toward unauthorized copying by prominent ATypI members, specifically Monotype. However, a court case concluded that Corsiva was sufficiently separate as a design to avoid payment of damages, noting that while the fonts were "similar", "the typeface is based upon 15th and 16th Century calligraphic designs from Rome and Venice. In fact, Ms. Saunders' research and work done on creating Corsiva was televised on the BBC program, Landmarks."

References

International Typeface Corporation typefaces Script typefaces Typefaces and fonts introduced in 1979 Zapf Chancery {{typography-stub

History

Variants and similar typefaces

See also

References